Google Changes Youtube Rules to Protect Advertisers

Alphabet Inc’s Google is making the biggest changes to its advertising rules on Youtube to protect advertisers from making their brand appearing in shady contents, which range from terrorist propaganda to inappropriate depictions of children.

The Google-owned video site will impose stricter criteria for the types of videos that can earn money on the site, and will introduce a new vetting process for the top-shelf videos it offers advertisers, according to the company.

Effective immediately, to apply for monetization and have ads attached to videos, creators must have tallied 4,000 hours of overall watch time on their channel within the past 12 months and have at least 1,000 subscribers.

Youtube will enforce the new eligibility policy for all existing channels as of February 20th. That means that channels that fail to meet the requirements will no longer be able to make income from ads.

 “A big part of that effort will be strengthening our requirements for monetization so spammers, impersonators, and other bad actors can’t just hurt our ecosystem or take advantage of you, while continuing to reward those who make our platform great,” said Neal Mohan, chief product officer, and Robert Kyncl, chief business officer, on Youtube’s creator blog.

Previously, the older criteria for joining its Partner Program were 10,000 views. These new rules would certainly make it harder for new, smaller channels to reach monetization, but Youtube said it’s an important way of buying itself more time to see who’s following the guidelines.

Over the years, advertisers have found their ads next to content that features hate videos and child-exploiting clips on Youtube.

Just recently, a top Youtube star, Logan Paul, came under fire for posting a video featuring a suicide victim in Japan’s Aokigahara forest. Youtube removed the channels of Logan Paul from its Google Preferred platform, a service designed for advertisers.

In December, Youtube said it planned to hire thousands of reviewers to screen content on the site and remove inappropriate content. The company said all of the Google Preferred videos in the United States would be vetted by humans by mid-February, and the new monitoring system will extend globally by the end of March.

“While that threshold provided more information to determine whether a channel followed our community guidelines and policies, it’s been clear over the last few months that we need a higher standard,” said Kyncl and Mohan in the blog post.

Shares of Alphabet Inc, the parent company of Google, fell 0.04% to finish at $1,121.76 in the last trading session.

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